Scarpetta Factor [Paperback]

Patricia Cornwell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 2009

It is the week before Christmas. The effects of the credit crunch have prompted Dr Kay Scarpetta to offer her services pro bono to New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. But in no time at all, her increased visibility seems to precipitate a string of dramatic and unsettling events. She is asked live on the air about the sensational case of Hannah Starr, who has vanished and is presumed dead. Moments later during the same broadcast, she receives a startling call-in from a former psychiatric patient of Benton Wesley's. When she returns after the show to the apartment where she and Benton live, she finds a suspicious package ? possibly a bomb ? waiting for her at the front desk. Soon the apparent threat on Scarpetta's life finds her embroiled in a deadly plot that includes a famous actor accused of an unthinkable sex crime and the disappearance of a beautiful millionairess with whom Scarpetta's niece Lucy seems to have shared a secret past...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Patricia Cornwell and James Patterson: Author One-on-One
In this Amazon exclusive, we brought together blockbuster authors Patricia Cornwell and James Patterson and asked them to interview each other. Find out what two of the top authors of their genres have to say about their characters, writing process, and more.

James Patterson is one of the bestselling writers of all time, with more than 170 million copies of his books sold worldwide. He is the author of two of the most popular detective series of the past decade, featuring Alex Cross and the Women's Murder Club, and he also writes nonfiction and The Maximum Ride series for young readers. Read on to see James Patterson's questions for Patricia Cornwell, or turn the tables to see what Cornwell asked Patterson.

Patterson: Here's a chance to say all the great things the critics would about The Scarpetta Factor, if there were any newspapers left that still reviewed books. Or, as they say in the TV interviews: Tell us about this one, Patricia.

Cornwell: As was true in the last book (Scarpetta), the new one is set in New York City, and it begins with Kay Scarpetta working on the autopsy of a young woman who presumably was murdered the night before in Central Park. While the apparent circumstances of the violent crime say one thing, the body is telling Scarpetta a very different and incredibly disturbing story that causes the prosecutor, the police, other officials, and even Scarpetta's friends and colleagues, to wonder if she's making mistakes or has begun to believe her own legend. While others are questioning and criticizing her, she begins to doubt herself and her decision to be the senior forensic analyst for CNN—an exposure that possibly leads to her BlackBerry disappearing and a suspicious package being left for her at her apartment building. As the intrigue unfolds, the past is no longer past, and she is soon faced with an old nemesis who threatens to be her final undoing.

Patterson: This book is set in New York again—what do you like about the Big City? What don't you like?

Cornwell: Certainly New York City is the ultimate Big City. By placing Scarpetta in the midst of NYC within its medical examiner's office, I've positioned her on an international stage where anything can and does happen. The machinery is huge (NYPD and the FBI field office, for example), yet the private lives of the characters remain intimate and small. Not only is this a big story about a big-city case that captivates the world, it's also a very close look at the characters and who and what they are to one another in contemporary times. In terms of what I like and don't like about NYC? The only thing I don't like about it is driving there.

Patterson: I often get asked what I have in common with Alex Cross. What would you say you have in common with Kay Scarpetta?

Cornwell: Scarpetta and I share the same values and sensibilities. We approach cases the same way (which should be rather obvious, since I work the cases by taking on her persona). Beyond that, there are many differences. I'm not Catholic or Italian or married to Benton Wesley. I'm not a forensic pathologist with a law degree. I don't have her emotional discipline or inhibitions, nor do I have her professional dazzle. (I always remind people I was an English major who started working at age eleven, first as a babysitter, then in food service!) I don't have Scarpetta's pedigree. But then, she isn't a writer, unless she's writing professional journal articles or autopsy reports.

Patterson: What's your routine like when it comes to writing? Do you do write every day? On the road? Do you need vacations from your writing?

Cornwell: I wish I had more of a routine. I begin each book with research that continues up to the very end of the process. But gradually, as I approach the deadline, I sink deeper into seclusion until eventually I don’t even answer e-mails or the phone anymore (unless it's my partner, Staci). I just write morning, noon, and night. The pulling together and completion of a novel is so intense, I'm almost living out of body by the time I'm done. It's the most wonderful and miserable experience imaginable. I would love a vacation but never seem to have time, and I doubt I'd know what to do if you made me "do nothing." In fact, Staci and I have a strange habit of going to foreign lands and visiting their police departments and morgues instead of just hanging out at the beach. I don't write every day because I do so much research, and currently, I have many other responsibilities that keep me busier than ever (filming, involvement with forensic institutes—just the business of life, for example).

Patterson: What's the best feedback you've had from a reader? Or—what was the best piece of writing advice you've had?

Cornwell: Frankly, the best feedback was when a reader complained some years ago that he wasn’t sure I liked my characters anymore. And I thought about this and realized I wasn’t sure I did, either. A horrible thing to realize. It was because the series had gone on for so long that it was time to reinvent the characters and their relationships with one another and the world they inhabit. I think this remake is most apparent in the last book, Scarpetta, and I am on a wonderful and invigorating new course that is even more evident in the new one, The Scarpetta Factor.

Patterson: Bonus question: How do you feel about the Hollywood adaptations of your work? Don't be afraid—let it all hang out.

Cornwell: In the past, very disappointed, because the projects went nowhere. Now, so far so good. The first films (Lifetime movies of At Risk and The Front, which are non-Scarpetta novellas) air this spring. I had a magnificent experience from beginning to end with the producers, actors—everyone. It's way too early to talk about the 20th Century Fox project with Angelina Jolie, although who wouldn't be excited about her?

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--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Bestseller Cornwell's solid 17th thriller to feature Dr. Kay Scarpetta (after Scarpetta) finds Scarpetta—who's the senior forensic analyst for CNN—probing the murder of a Central Park jogger as well as looking into the disappearance of Hannah Starr, a wealthy financial planner. Quizzed on-air about previously undisclosed details of the perplexing Starr case, Scarpetta realizes that the tentacles of the case reach further than she imagined. Her niece, forensic computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, has her own reasons for digging into Starr's disappearance, along with Lucy's girlfriend, New York County ADA Jaime Berger. NYPD Det. Pete Marino, another series staple, is also in the loop as a member of Berger's task force. But it's the dark past of Scarpetta's psychologist husband, Benton Wesley—particularly his presumed death in Point of Origin and shocking reappearance five years later in Blow Fly—that binds the disparate pieces together and make this one of Cornwell's stronger recent efforts. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown; Export ed edition (October 21, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316733172
• ISBN-13: 978-0316733175
• ASIN: 1408702274
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (332 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,060,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Patricia Cornwell was born on June 9, 1956, in Miami, Florida, and grew up in Montreat, North Carolina.

Following graduation from Davidson College in 1979, she began working at the Charlotte Observer, rapidly advancing from listing television programs to writing feature articles to covering the police beat. She won an investigative reporting award from the North Carolina Press Association for a series of articles on prostitution and crime in downtown Charlotte.

Her award-winning biography of Ruth Bell Graham, A Time for Remembering, was published in 1983. From 1984 to 1990, she worked as a technical writer and a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia.

Cornwell's first crime novel, Postmortem, was published by Scribner's in 1990. Initially rejected by seven major publishing houses, it became the first novel to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity Awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d'Aventure in a single year. In Postmortem, Cornwell introduced Dr. Kay Scarpetta as the intrepid Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 1999, Dr. Scarpetta herself won the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author.

Following the success of her first novel, Cornwell has written a series of bestsellers featuring Kay Scarpetta, her detective sidekick Pete Marino and her brilliant and unpredictable niece, Lucy Farinelli, including: Body of Evidence (1991); All That Remains (1992); Cruel and Unusual (1993), which won Britain's prestigious Gold Dagger Award for the year's best crime novel; The Body Farm (1994); From Potter's Field (1995); Cause of Death (1996); Unnatural Exposure (1997); Point of Origin (1998); Black Notice (1999); The Last Precinct (2000); Blow Fly (2003); Trace (2004); Predator (2005); Book of the Dead (2007), which won the 2008 Galaxy British Book Awards' Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year, making Cornwell the first American ever to win this award; Scarpetta (2008); The Scarpetta Factor (2009); and Port Mortuary (2010). In 2011 Cornwell was awarded the Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of France's most prestigious awards to honor those who have distinguished themselves in the domains of art or literature, or by their contribution to the development of culture in France and throughout the world.

In addition to the Scarpetta novels, she has written three best-selling books featuring Andy Brazil: Hornet's Nest (1996), Southern Cross (1998) and Isle of Dogs (2001); two cook books: Scarpetta's Winter Table (1998) and Food to Die For (2001); and a children's book: Life's Little Fable (1999). In 1997, Cornwell updated A Time for Remembering, which was reissued as Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham. Intrigued by Scotland Yard's John Grieve's observation that no one had ever tried to use modern forensic evidence to solve the murders committed by Jack the Ripper, Cornwell began her own investigation of the serial killer's crimes. In Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (2002), she narrates her discovery of compelling evidence to indict the famous artist Walter Sickert as the Ripper.

In January 2006, the New York Times Magazine began a 15-week serialization of At Risk, featuring Massachusetts State Police investigator Win Garano and his boss, district attorney Monique Lamont. Its sequel, The Front, was serialized in the London Times in the spring of 2008. Both novellas were subsequently published as books and promptly optioned for adaptation by Lifetime Television Network, starring Daniel Sunjata and Andie MacDowell. The films made their debut in April 2010.

In April 2009, Fox acquired the film rights to the Scarpetta novels, featuring Angelina Jolie as Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Cornwell herself wrote and co-produced the movie ATF for ABC.

Often interviewed on national television as a forensic consultant, Cornwell is a founder of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, a founding member of the National Forensic Academy, a member of the Advisory Board for the Forensic Sciences Training Program at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, NYC, and a member of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital's National Council, where she is an advocate for psychiatric research. She is also well known for her philanthropic contributions to animal rescue and criminal justice, as well as endowing college scholarships and promoting the cause of literacy on the national scene. Some of her projects include the establishment of an ICU at Cornell's Animal Hospital, the archaeological excavation of Jamestown and the scientific study of the Confederacy's submarine H.L. Hunley. Most recently, she donated a million dollars to Harvard's Fogg Museum to establish a chair in inorganic science.

Cornwell's books have been translated into 36 languages across more than 50 countries, and she is regarded as one of the major international best-selling authors. Her novels are praised for their meticulous research and an insistence on accuracy in every detail, especially in forensic medicine and police procedures. She is so committed to verisimilitude that, among other accomplishments, she became a helicopter pilot and a certified scuba diver, and qualified for a motorcycle license because she was writing about characters who were doing these things. "It is important to me to live in the world I write about," she often says. "If I want a character to do or know something, I want to do or know the same thing."

Visit the author's website at: www.patriciacornwell.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

577 of 602 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What A Fan Wants, January 6, 2010

By 

Anonymous (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Scarpetta Factor (A Scarpetta Novel) (Hardcover)

Your sales were down 50% from last year. You failed to hit the #1 slot on the NYT bestsellers list for the first time in, like, a hundred years. So what do we, the readers, want?

1. Brevity. Your last two books ballooned to 500 pages. And you used to be so concise!!

2. The third person has to go. We all loved Kay, we loved hearing her thoughts.

3. Dump the spouse. Benton is boring. Your new forays into the mind and psychobabble are also boring.

4. Go back to the morgue. Yes, it's been done a billion times since you introduced it but readers still like it and you still do it better than anyone.

5. Take a lesson from Sue Grafton. U is for Undertow just hit #1. The Scarpetta Factor did not. Kinsey's still Kinsey. Kay is no longer Kay. There's no more sharp tone, sharp heels, dread, bad dreams, bad tempers, worry, loss of appetite, compassion, sleepless nights, wry banter with Marino, ability to work 5 days straight without changing clothes .... We want that back. None of this idealized version you've given us, with everyone lusting after her or admiring her or losing it while she floats above it all in her highrise apartments. What happened to her gardens, the fresh tomatoes, the cooking? Highrises are so sterile. Benton is so sterile. (The Scarpetta Factor had one cooking scene at the end that felt very contrived.)

6. Stop trying to elevate Kay. She got fired from Richmond. She tried and ended several apparently unsuccessful businesses. With that past no way will she be on CNN hosting the Scarpetta Factor. That would be like you hosting CNBC. Ain't gonna happen. Kay's superiority came from her brains and moral compass -- not her jobs and not her money.

7. But what's wrong with being "just" an M.E. in NY or Boston anyway? It's what we want.

8. Marino is a big, crude, uncouth man. Forever, he'll have wisps of hair and trail his raincoat belt. He's a great cop. Why mess with him? Forget the biker, forget the shaved head. Marino's all about cheap suits. Remember that.

9. Lucy is best in very, very small doses. She's WAY too crazy and a brat and should have been in jail long ago. If you're going to keep her, keep her relatively poor. She got crazier with every dollar.

10. Your own words: "Write what you know." You know cops. You know forensics. You're not a shrink. We don't want you to be.

11. Ditto: "All my science is real." Now it's suddenly "possible." Awful. Stop that.

12. You used to have beautifully written scenes. Now it's dialogue and the most basic prose. "The Monday I carried Ronnie Joe Waddell's meditation in my pocketbook, I never saw the sun. It was dark out when I drove to work that morning. It was dark again when I drove home. Small raindrops spun in my headlights, the night gloomy with fog and bitterly cold. I built a fire in my living room and envisioned Virginia farmland and tomatoes ripening in the sun. I imagined a young black man in the hot cab of a pickup truck and wondered if his head had been full of murder back then...."

That was good stuff.

13. Stay on track. You had a formula: Kay solves a death, someone's after Kay. Sometimes that someone had to do with the case, sometimes not. Simple. Stop taking these unending side trips to nowhere with dog torturers, and weird lonely people. Your bad guys have gone from a gentle man crazy under the influence of drugs (Waddell), to a beautiful and evil mother to the brilliant Gault to increasingly far-fetched fantasies. Werewolves, shrinks, twisted celebs.... Sometimes simple is elegant.

14. Stop being too topical. Your best books -- your earliest books -- are a pleasure, a comfort, to pick up. I can't tell what the economy was doing or who was president. They carry me deep into a world I don't know but find exciting and want to know. I don't want so many reminders of where I actually am.

15. NO SEX. Not with Kay, not with cardboard Benton, certainly not with Marino. Really. At this point it would be like hearing about your parents having sex. Do NOT want to go there.

16. Quantico was a great place to visit. Yeah, yeah, you hate the FBI since you-know-what but they once gave you a wonderful vehicle. Maybe it's time to forgive and forget.

17. You made a huge mistake when you brought Benton back. You made another mistake when Marino did that crazy thing you said he did -- I won't even dignify it by repeating it, it's so out of character. You made another mistake when you made Lucy as rich as Buffett and as lawless as a criminal. The Rocco murder -- too crazy to even address. As readers, we don't gasp and say "brilliant! we didn't see it coming." We say it's out of character and would never happen.

18. You made another mistake when Kay got married (UGH!) and shared her space. Kay was a hero to the unsung, to misfits, to the weak. She's friends with judges but family to Lucy and Marino. (Oddly enough, Benton has never felt like family.) She's somehow diluted by Benton. She's become something less, taken on some of his duller, cooler colors. She seems meeker, removed, out of touch. It's terrible to see.

19. Benton was at least bearable in the beginning. He had a talent (now it's useless psychobabble and navel-staring). He had a twinkle in his eye. Now he's petty and vindictive. For sure, Kay and Benton shouldn't be working together.

20. Get an editor. No, a real one, not your ex- for Pete's sake! One who's not afraid to take a red pen to your work and keep you honest.

205 of 225 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best of the series in a long long time, October 22, 2009

By 

Deborah Verlen "Deborah" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Scarpetta Factor (A Scarpetta Novel) (Hardcover)

To be frank, I was never going to read another Scarpetta mystery after the last few disasters that Cornwell wrote. However, there the book was on the new releases shelf at the library staring down at me with a silent "read me" plea. Seemed like fate that I got to the library in time to pick up Cornwell's latest entry in the ongoing Scarpetta series. I opened it and started reading with a lot of trepidation as her last few books have been truly dreadful. To sum it up--I was pleasantly surprised to find Cornwell has regained her stride in the series and has written a taut, suspenseful mystery with believable characters and situations. There are a lot of twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the end.

The series opens with Scarpetta doing pro bono work in New York City as well as fulfilling her role as senior forensic analyst for CNN. During her appearance on the CNN show she is asked about details on the ongoing case of Hannah Starr. The complexity of the mystery starts to weave almost immediately. Her husband Benton and her friend Marino are clashing. Her niece Lucy continues to waiver between the gray areas of the law. But all three must work together with Scarpetta as they race to solve this mystery.

This book still lacks some of the sparkling dialogue of the first books and rehashes old hurts and insults. However, Scarpetta comes of more human somehow as she struggles with the mystery of Hannah Starr, the offer of her own show, her shaky marriage, her injured friendship with Marino, and of course her troubled niece. It is truly nice to see Cornwell once again pick up the reigns of the series and alter course for the better!

121 of 134 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too long and over-stuffed with technical jargon, October 24, 2009

By 

A.R.N. (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Scarpetta Factor (A Scarpetta Novel) (Hardcover)

At 500 pp this book needs serious editing. Parts of it were incredibly boring (mostly the Benton parts) and parts of it were meaninglessly techno-filled. Cornwell tries to dazzle us with all the research she does but the book would be A LOT better if Kay and her world were the focus and the Bentons and Lucys remained minor satellites. In fact, if she cut out most of the stuff she probably learned from the list of people in the acknowledgements, she'd have a stronger and more readable book. Resorting to recycling one of the most mocked and reviled characters in Scarpetta lore was unnecessary, too.

Not one of her best, not one of her worst, but I don't understand what's now a two-book trend of forcing us to swallow 500 pages. She leads us on long and detailed side trips with characters and drama that turn out to be irrelevant and unnecessary and I'm not talking about red herrings, either, but long, winding meanderings: Agee, his hearing problems, Berger and her romance woes with Lucy, the ridiculous voodoo/poo-poo bomb, Hap and his necrophilia, the missing Blackberry and the huge drama surrounding it, the RIDICULOUS and boring psycho-babbling between Benton and an old colleague in the beginning of the book that nearly had me putting the book down for good; the immature Benton-Marino tension that dissolved seemingly in an instant. It's a shame that Cornwell feels the need to keep piling on to keep our interest.

It was interesting that Lucy apparently has lost a substantial part of her fortune. It may be the best thing to ever happen to Lucy as her brattiness and craziness seemed to increase with her wealth. That was an event that I thought deserved more detail and certainly more of an emotional reaction from Kay.